Winsted residents to pay higher prices for use of town's cemeteries

Published 12:00 am, Thursday, September 6, 2012

WINSTED -- Residents using the town's cemeteries will have to pay a higher price after the Board of Selectmen approved increased fees on Tuesday night.

The board voted unanimously -- minus Second Selectman Candy Perez, who was an excused absence -- to repeal six sections of the Winsted ordinances, and to adopt a new fee schedule for the town's cemeteries. The new fees are, by and large, in line with the average costs of numerous cemeteries in the region, except for those regarding winter burials.

"All this is is a housekeeping motion," said town manager Dale Martin about the motion to repeal the ordinances.

These ordinances were superceded at the Aug. 20 Board of Selectmen meeting, at which the board voted to approve new ordinances regarding cemeteries. The new ordinances also grant the power to amend burial fees to the Board of Selectmen, and the new schedule is intended to more accurately reflect the cost of burials.

Specifically, the fees to bury or cremate a person in the winter have increased by several times their original cost. According to the new schedule, a winter burial on a weekday will now cost $1,700, rather than the previous fee of $350. Similarly, the fees for a winter cremation were sextupled, climbing from $125 to $775 for a weekday cremation. The previous fees, though, were below the lowest fees from a survey of 11 cemeteries in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Prevously, Winsted charged $550 for a holiday winter burial. That fee was less than half of the lowest surveyed cemetery -- Saint Ann's in Avon -- which charges $1,150 for a holiday winter burial. The survey included cemeteries not only in northwestern Connecticut, but stretching southeast into New Britain and Meriden, as well as north into Chicopee, Massachusetts.

Now Playing:

While the new fees for winter burials are on the higher end of the range from the survey, the fees for cemetery plots are largely in line with other neighboring towns. The fees for a single plot or a cremains plot only increased by $100, which -- in the case of a single plot -- are near the average fees from the survey. However, the fees for cremains plots are near, if not in excess of, the highest fees from the survey.